Site Speed

There’s been a lot said about site speed recently. Two years ago, Matt Cutts indicated that site speed was now an indicator in Google Algorithm. I thought it would be informative to see just how site speed can add to our bottom line.

Based on several studies, the following information was discovered:

40% of your visitors will abandon a site if loading takes longer than 3 seconds (Gomez)

50% of your visitors expect a site to load in 2 seconds or less (Gomez)

1 second in loading time decreases conversions by 7% (Strange Loop)

1 second delay in loading time decreases page views by 11% (Strange Loop)

If an eCommerce site is making $100k in revenue per day, a 1 second load delay equates to $2.5M in lost revenue annually.

Amazon calculated that a page load slowdown of just one second could cost them $1.6 billion in sales each year. According to Amazon’s own findings they determined that for every 100ms (milliseconds) of site speed improvement they gain a 1% increase in revenue. So a 1,000ms, or 1 second improvement in speed equates to a 10% increase in revenue.

Google has calculated that by slowing its search results by just four tenths of a second they could lose 8 million searches per day. So quick search queries and page load speeds are very important to them.

Shopzilla sped up average page load time from 6 seconds to 1.2 seconds, and increased revenue by 12%, and page views by 25%.

Yahoo increased traffic by 9% for every 400ms of improvement.

According to these factors, as you work on improving your page load speed, you should see positive improvements in traffic, conversions and sales. There are several different elements to consider when trying to improve you page load time. The size of images, backgrounds, borders, are all common areas to look first. Google has a good tool that will analyze your URL speed and give you recommendations to improving site speed. https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/